Would the framers have been ashamed by — or proud of — Donald Trump?

The nation’s forefathers might have found plenty to like about President Donald Trump.

The nation’s forefathers might have found plenty to like about President Donald Trump. (Three Lions/Getty Images)

Stephen B. Presser

Among the slings and arrows that have been dispatched against Donald Trump by disappointed Democrats and their allies in the media is the suggestion that the president is the kind of demagogue the framers warned us against, and that men like Washington, Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton are shedding tears in heaven as they watch our republic descend into incompetence and chaos.

This, I think, betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about our constitutional scheme, and the kind of leaders the framers contemplated. As a longtime student of 18th century legal and constitutional history, I think it is much more likely that those who adopted and implemented the Constitution would have been pleased by President Trump.

Perhaps it should be admitted at the outset that some elements of Trump's approach to government would have raised Washington's eyebrow. The practice of firing off tweets in the early morning hours would have been regarded as a bit outre, without a doubt, but Trump's atypical candor and lack of previous public office would have been applauded.

When George Washington went back to his farm after two terms, much as Cincinnatus went back to his after serving the Roman Republic, our nation's first president was reflecting the belief, common among the framers, that professional politicians were a bad idea, because the temptation to take spoils, to feed at the public trough, had to be discouraged. If the framers were to find anyone in the 2016 contest horrifying, I suspect it would be Hillary and Bill Clinton, whose fortunes gained from their time in government demonstrated the very corruption rampant in Great Britain and that our Constitution was designed to discourage.

Trump's 2005 "locker room" banter with former TV personality Billy Bush, which the media amplified to such a degree that it appeared to threaten Trump's 2016 presidential candidacy, might be thought to suggest that he was something other than the 18th century's model of a gentleman, but this, too, may miss the mark. Alexander Hamilton, undoubtedly our greatest secretary of Treasury, was nearly done in by an extramarital affair, and even the semisainted Thomas Jefferson blushed to admit that he once "offered love to a handsome lady" who was not his wife. Washington and James Madison were not known for similarly randy behavior, but Madison made clear in the Federalist Papers that our Constitution was designed to come to grips with the fact that men were not angels (if they were, no government would be necessary). Thus the constitutional schemes of separation of powers and federalism, by means of which the framers erected checks and balances to counter inevitable human tendencies to indulge in excessive behavior with harmful consequences.

In our last presidential administration, the principle of separation of powers was all but ignored, as President Barack Obama tended to govern by executive orders (at least when he was unable to secure his aims through congressional legislation), and when his administration engaged in behavior that was repeatedly struck down by the courts.

In contrast, even when he vehemently disagreed with and lambasted the courts who frustrated his initiatives (and Jefferson was famous for railing at what he took to be the partiality of John Marshall's Supreme Court), President Trump meekly follows the orders of the lower courts.

There is another side to President Trump that was in evidence during his recent trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and to Rome that resonated as well with the ideology of the framers. We tend to think of those who forged the Constitution as figures not deeply committed to religion, with Jefferson, a noted Deist, and a man skeptical of the divinity of Christ, as the most prominent example. Jefferson and a handful of other framers like him were the exception, however, and most of the framers would have shared the notion of Washington, Hamilton, and their contemporary Samuel Chase of Maryland, that there could be no order without law, no law without morality and no morality without religion.

These timeless truths are rather out of fashion in our day, but if Trump's speeches made in his stops abroad are any indication, he is comfortable with this perspective that has prevailed throughout most of American history. The rabid secularism and political correctness which Trump has always railed against would have alarmed the framers much more than any of Trump's vulgarities.

It is too early, after only a few months, to fully and accurately assess the character of President Trump, but many of the framers (Washington and Hamilton are examples here) were speculators, and Hamilton, in his time, was involved in founding a bank and a newspaper, as well as one of the leading commercial legal practices in New York.

Rather than something new and disconcerting, I think President Trump is rather a throwback, and quite possibly a fortunate one for the republic at that.

Stephen B. Presser is a professor of legal history emeritus at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and the author of "Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law."

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Editor's note: This op-ed has been corrected to state that it was Cincinnatus who went back to his farm after military leadership in Rome, not Cato.